The love-hate nature of the relations between England and Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is well known. Ever since Henry VIII broke with Rome after Pope Clement VII refused to allow his divorce, things Italian were a popular object of satire and general disdain. An ever-increasing British nationalism founded on political, religious, and aesthetic principles during the seventeenth century fanned the flames of anti-Italian sentiment. This nationalism, newly consolidated in the seventeenth century by the ambitions of the Stuart monarchs to destroy Parliament, was intimately connected with English Protestantism. As Samuel Kliger has argued, the triumph of the Goths—Protestant Englishmen's Germanic ancestors—over Roman tyranny in antiquity became for seventeenth-century England a symbol of democratic success. Moreover, observes Kliger, an influential theory rooted in the Reformation, the “translatio imperii ad Teutonicos,” emphasized traditional German racial qualities—youth, vigor, manliness, and moral purity—over those of Latin culture—torpor, decadence, effeminacy, and immorality—and contributed to the modern constitution of the supreme role of the Goths in history. The German translatio implied an analogy between the conquest of the Roman Empire by the Goths (under Charlemagne) and the rallying of the humanist-reformers of northern Europe (e.g., Luther) for religious freedom, understood as liberation from Roman priestcraft; that is, “the translatio crystallized the idea that humanity was twice ransomed from Roman tyranny and depravity—in antiquity by the Goths, in modern times by their descendants, the German reformers…the epithet ‘Gothic’ became not only a polar term in political discussion, a trope for the ‘free,’ but also in religious discussion a trope for all those spiritual, moral, and cultural values contained for the eighteenth century in the single word ‘enlightenment.’”

The first third of the twentieth century was the most important period in the performance history of Restoration comedies—with the exception of the years 1660–1710, when they were originally written and performed. Sixteen of the plays were presented in early twentieth-century London, six in at least two different productions. Post-Carolean works by William Congreve, George Farquhar, and John Vanbrugh held the stage through the war years, but, beginning in 1920, earlier comedies by John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Villiers entered the repertoire of performed plays. This represents a limited selection of Restoration playwrights and plays, to be sure, but this relatively small cluster of productions takes on large significance when we situate it in the context of the comedies' entire performance careers.

Political activism among actors has become common in twentieth-century America, from patriotic support for war bonds in the two world wars to antiwar declarations during the Vietnam era; from campaigning for presidential hopefuls to more recent environmental activism. We may forget, then, that actors, wary of social disapproval, traditionally had maintained a low political profile in America. The spread-eagle rhetoric of Edwin Forrest may have made his Democratic sympathies well known in antebellum America, but the subsequent actions of John Wilkes Booth only reinforced actors' belief that they were best served by political quietism.

As many historians of American theater and culture know, the Fenwick Library of George Mason University (GMU) became the home in 1974 to a major collection of Federal Theatre Project (FTP) materials. As many researchers also know, some FTP material was removed from GMU to the Library of Congress in the fall of 1994. In this essay, I will bring Theatre Survey's readers up to date on the status of the FTP collection, which, because of its continuing development over two decades, houses not only a considerable body of FTP material but also early records of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA). ANTA in its earliest days was a worthy successor to the FTP in the drive to have a national theater in the United States. Since 1980, all of these holdings have been an integral part of the Center for Government, Society and the Arts (CGSA) at GMU. CGSA has been the site of many activities exploring the relationship between our government and the arts, ranging from conferences on theater and cultural studies to our own theatrical productions of FTP materials, some of which I will outline here.

For the well-received 1990 Bochum Schauspielhaus production of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, Dieter Hacker, one of Germany's leading artists and stage designers, created fifty-four masks, including the one on the opposite page for Timon himself (Figure I). This mask, Hacker's designs, and photographs of the production were seen in the recent exhibition “Contemporary Stage Design from German and Austria” at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, presented in collaboration with the Goethe House and German Cultural Center in New York.